Keeley Thomson (Book 2): Keelzebub (2 page)

Still, “dating” her own sister was just a gross idea. Yeck.

Darla grinned at her, a charming thing, but then, she’d had time to practice. Almost everything she did had style, or charm, or was just right in some way or another.

“Tell you what, you go and get cleaned up, wash a bit of that blood off and make sure you don’t smell like a locker room, and I’ll fix some of my famous chocolate chicken?” She held up her right hand to forestall speech.

“Before you ask, yes, I do have cake. Ice cream too. You need to eat more. I get the idea, that we’re trying to hide everything from your parents, but that can’t be allowed to keep you from food as much as it has been. You’re losing too much weight, too fast.”

Keeley nodded.

“Yeah, I know. I’m trying, but it really is hard. I mean, I can’t hide much in my room. Mom doesn’t like food anywhere but the kitchen and dining room, thanks to her OCD, and she cleans my room daily. Sometimes more than that. Great for keeping things tidy, but kind of hard to keep anything secret.”

Darla just shrugged.

“So don’t. Tell her that you’ve been secretly exercising a lot more than you used too and that I mentioned you’re looking a little anorexic. Get her to feed you more, just to reassure herself it isn’t drugs. OK, she’ll probably end up thinking you’re bulimic, but at least you won’t starve as much. I’ll send you with some extra stuff and you can just put it in the kitchen. Your dad doesn’t seem the type to inventory the cupboards.”

Keeley almost sat down on the nice white sofa, but stopped herself, covered with sweat and blood after all, so she really needed to avoid touching anything. As it was she didn’t know how she’s get the floor clean. It had splatters on it.

“Argh. OK, I need that shower first, is it alright if I use the guest room for that? The one without a Lesser Demon in it? I caught him trying to watch me in the shower the other day. He was “invisible” as if that would work, the door was closed, but that fear he projects all the time is a dead giveaway. If he ever realizes that’s what I’m using to track him…”

Darla winked again.

“Yeah, total perv. He hasn’t tried that with me yet, but then he’s probably trying to get information on you, to break your deal. Yes, though, go right ahead. Use the second one? I’ve designated that as your room. It has your clothing in it. The new things I’ve been getting you.” It wasn’t a hint to put any of them on, because they both knew there was a schedule.

The shower water was warm and wonderful, the water red, then pink at first, and no nine foot tall brown and black Lesser Demons spied on her, not that she could tell at least. Bal was probably off watching the rest of her friends, to make sure no one tried to kill them. After Rob had been beaten to death a week before, she’d been worried about some of them. Mainly Eve, Gary and Hally. Hence a guard. One that had orders to not be seen or let them realize he was there. Bad enough they’d all seen him once already. Hally and Eve twice.

The others had denied it the next day, which was really normal, even healthy.

Humans made themselves not notice a lot of things, Darla had told her. Which Keeley already knew. That wasn’t holding for Hally though, who kept trying to talk about what had happened, fighting to make sense of something that just didn’t, unless you accounted for there being a giant supernatural creature involved.

It was a problem, but not really hers, specifically. Keeley wasn’t in charge of them, they belonged to her sister. Oh, sure, she liked them all well enough, and felt protective of them, but it wouldn’t be a good idea to try and steal them from Darla. That also meant the much older girl could handle Hally in this situation. Or not, as she chose. Telling her the truth might work, if the girl could be coaxed into not telling anyone else that was.

Going around telling people that Demons were real probably wouldn’t play very well, after all.

The shower took longer than she wanted, because she had to wash her hair before the blood set. Normally she wouldn’t have, because it took a long time to really get dry, but coming home with matted hair would be just as telling as wet and this would be easier to hide in the long run. She could borrow a hair dryer, right?

When she got to the table in the very nice dining room, just off the kitchen, not really a separate area, just one with a table off to the side, near the door, since, as Darla put it, the whole place was meant for friends, not guests.

She had another house for that.

Because she was also her grandmother, the owner of a multinational company that worked in a dozen areas of technology. From computers to bio-tech. Keeley’s father worked at the headquarters, as an accountant. That job had been how Darla had gotten the Thomson family to move to the area.

The table was set with nice plates, real silverware, and enough food to choke half the football team. The one thing that had really changed in the last weeks was how much she had to eat, when she could. If she let herself feel it, she was starving almost all the time. She had to use mental tricks to get past the almost burning hunger just to make it through the day. Even eating regularly barely put a dent in it.

They ate in silence for a while, putting away more food than really should have been physically possible, she knew, but still was. She just wasn’t a person. A human. It processed so fast that even as she ate, with almost each bite, room was made for more. On the good side it was hard for her to get fat.

On the bad, if she didn’t make a habit of wolfing down incredible amounts of food, she’d become a walking skeleton. Almost literally, if Darla wasn’t exaggerating to try and get her to eat more. She decided to just skip that part if she could.

The half a cake Darla mentioned was dessert, a cloyingly sweet dark chocolate thing with butter cream frosting between the layers. It may have been half a standard sized round cake, but it had four full sized layers, making it more like a whole cake cut in half and set on top the bottom, to double the height. She ate it all, almost without notice. When she was done, oddly, she still wanted more.

That got another sigh as her new sister made a silly face at her.

“You need more, don’t you?” She said, as if it was only obvious, even though it had been a vast amount of food already.

“Yes. I feel like a pig though. Eating this much I mean. I should feel sick, but…”

“Don’t let it worry you, I’ve got some peanut butter ice cream, would that do?”

“Yes. Please.” The please got a smile from the woman, a genuine looking thing that reminded her a little of seeing a child with a brand new toy.

“OK. How about this, I’ll go get that and you just sit here and wait for me while I do the work, sound like a plan?” It was just in a conversational tone, but Keeley shook her head.

“No. That is too close to making a deal. If we’re going to do that, I’ll just stay here and you can signal that you want to be my slave forever by moving in any way at all… go ahead and move if it’s a deal.” Keeley grinned. She’d been wanting to see if that would work at all, but Darla just shook her head.

“Nope little sis, that won’t work on one of us. Good call though, catching that. By the way, that kind of thing can work on some creatures, not humans, oddly enough, unless you’re really old and powerful. Durgs though, so keep that in mind if you have to deal with my homecoming date at some point. His kind are tough to kill and about twice as strong as we are. The grown up Demons I mean, not you. So keep that in mind. Really easy to enslave though, so they tend to avoid our people like it’s going out of style.” She stood and went into the kitchen, speaking the whole time.

“Really, that’s probably a good sign that Quince doesn’t know about either of us. He’d probably leave the city if he did. Unless he’s working for someone powerful enough to keep him from being stolen away. So another of us, if that’s the case.”

She came back with a giant glass bowl, heaps of ice cream in it, with a lot of real whipped cream on top, sprinkled with finely chopped nuts and a hot caramel sauce.

Keeley practically drooled at the sight, but after the first bite shook her head.

“Wait, I know for a fact you didn’t have any hot caramel ready, how did you manage this, you weren’t gone for three minutes. Magic?”

“Indeed. A new type of device. Called a microwave. Really a miracle invention. You can do a lot with them if you pay attention to how they work. You just have to remember that it’s more like steaming food than roasting. Anyway, back to what I was saying, which was moving toward the idea that one of us should enslave Quince, just in case.” She waved at the dish in front of Keeley. “Since someone here can barely keep themselves fed yet, I’m thinking it might have to be me. Really, I don’t know if I need an Acadian Apple of my very own, but I’m sure I can find something for him to do. Besides that way Balthias won’t feel jealous and think you’re already replacing him.”

Keeley just nodded and pushed her glasses up with a single finger, only to find that she wasn’t wearing them. She didn’t need to any more. Right. They’d fixed that already. It was still strange though. Worse, no one had noticed at all yet, not even her parents. You’d think, after ten years of seeing her with them on her face, day after day, one of them might notice, but so far nothing.

She’d have felt unloved, except for the fact that she really didn’t have a clue what she was going to say when one of them did notice. They knew she couldn’t have contacts or corrective surgery, not yet. They should also realize that if she’d just been going without, she’d be walking into walls all over the place. Of course, she was currently avoiding her father as much as possible, being more than a little mad at him. Finally Keeley had managed to get a few friends, after most of a life without and what does he do?

Forbids her from seeing them.

Like that would work. They went to school together after all. Plus she had responsibilities now, some of which involved them.

Like helping with the Homecoming dance in two days.

That and help rig the football game.

Rob, who’d been her date to the dance, because his boyfriend Gary didn’t have the bust line to really pull off a proper dress, and the school officials were more than a little conservative, had been killed. That meant the team had dedicated the game to him. It made sense; he’d been one of them after all. It would help morale a little if they won and hurt the whole school for a long time if they lost by too much.

Worse, the guys that had probably killed him were from Wilson, the school they were playing against. Probably on the football team. They didn’t know that for certain though, so retaliation was off the table for the time being. Once they found who did it, Darla had already shared that she planned to kill them. Or it. Whoever or whatever they were. Keeley didn’t blame her one bit.

Rob had been one of hers after all. One of Darla’s people. Someone she was grooming to work for her later in life. She’d already invested over a year on the boy and someone had just come and taken all that away. Yes, Rob’s life too, which was more important, at least to Keeley, but by Demon law and social rules, killing someone marked as hers meant that Darla could extract a price. That being anything she had the power to make happen, no matter who it was that had done it.

That, of course, was a lot. Much of what might happen being far more unpleasant that Keeley wanted to imagine. Not that she had too. Another Demon had “gifted” her with a store house of knowledge, one that floated outside her, but she could call on at any time. It was hard to use, because it was the memories of dozens of Demons, maybe all of them, plus a whole host of other creatures, thousands of year’s worth. Millions really. So a lot of it didn’t exactly make sense. Funny though, how to torture people and various other beings just popped right to the front with a casual thought. It was something Demons were known for, so had a lot of information related, making it easy to find.

If Keeley didn’t know better she’d have started to think her new relatives might be slightly less than good and wholesome individuals all the time.

“So… Any idea how we’re supposed to get our team to win against Wilson? I keep coming up with no more than a fifteen percent chance of our guys winning. They kind of suck. Maybe thirty percent if we get Quince to actually use superhuman abilities during the game, but even a good quarterback isn’t enough. Someone has to actually catch the ball, right? We can’t really just have him throw it between the goal posts or something…” It was actually a question. Keeley didn’t know a lot about the games rules. She could run the numbers of wins to losses and add in made up sums to approximate the human heart and desire to win, but it still didn’t seem very likely.

Her sister went still.

“I’ve been trying to find Rob’s killer. I get that we need to win, of course, but haven’t thought about it yet. Do you have anything? I’d suggest we not kill anyone. It will affect my area too much if a bunch of school children start dying. Even the one that’s happened already and the few beatings in the area have started an under currant of fear. I’d like to avoid adding to it simply to win a game.” Reaching over with her own spoon she stole a bite of ice cream.

Keeley shrugged.

“Get a few key players expelled? It would take something pretty drastic, to make sure that they don’t get to be in the game, but that should help a lot. Our team can beat their second string. Or, to be more honest, they have a fair chance of doing that. Wilson is probably going to take one of the top couple of places for the state this year. Before you ask, I know this thanks to the power of the internet. I looked it up. Go team Google.”

That got a smile at least. Keeley was glad, funny wasn’t always her best thing.

“Short time schedule, what did you have in mind?”

Keeley looked down and blushed. She actually had an idea, but it was kind of resource heavy and would take using some of Darla’s “friends” to get it all done in time. Taking a breath she decided to just dive in and hope it wasn’t stupid. Her sister would tell her if it was, no doubt.

“Well, I was thinking, if, and this is all up to you of course, but if we took some alcohol and put it in a few of the key players cars, or lockers, then arrange for your friend Roy or maybe some other people that work for him to casually notice it and make an issue? It’s kind of a catch and release thing here, minors in possession, especially if the police can’t prove ownership. Even drunk kids don’t get charged with anything really, but if it’s just before the big game and the Chief of Police decides that some kind of example should be made…” Roy was the Chief, so if he was in, that might work. Keeley looked back down and shrugged, avoiding eye contact.